cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1172345/is-it-worth-it
Come visit Europe.
Mate, I live in "Europe" and my town is a hellscape.
Average person living in Ludwigshafen
Same goes for living on college campus dorms.
It's the one time in american life that anyone gets to live in a walkable community.
They’re beautiful because they’re fake.
They often have enough room for 12-50 people, yet in lore they house thousands.
preeeetty sure that's just Bethesda games
usually there's at least an illusion of a larger settlement than what you can see
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you're running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it's smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it's surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of two thousand real world feet, which wouldn't even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn't even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
San Andreas has a similar effect when removing the fog. The map looks comically small.
I tried that in Morrowind years ago. I'm not sure if it was the same mod, or some version of the game with lots of graphics settings, but yeah.
I loved Morrowind so much. I played it so much that I took over a house and turned it into a museum for all my hoarded items and ridiculously valuable concoctions and trinkets.
Having unlimited view distance and seeing how freaking small the world really was completely blew my mind.
Along with the fog, the walking speed must have been even slower than I remember!
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
I replayed Ocarina of Time recently, the entirety of Hyrule is basically the size of a small town. Someone did the math and it was something like 55 hectares or 133 acres. Like Monaco is 4 times larger. Felt so expansive when I played it for the first time 25 years ago.
Grand theft auto
Smaller parking lots than building code requires
Wasn't there also a popular city sim that nerfed the size of parking lots because they realized if they made it accurate it would be really, really ugly?
Cities Skylines. So they decided cars that run out of parking space gets stowed into a pocket dimension.
Cyberpunk
One of the most walkable cities in video game history
You're kinda provin' the point. I don't go into GTA and think "yeah i'd live here".
They do also romanicize cities a bit. I don't think I've ever seen a traffick jam in GTA, for example.
Towns in most RPGs have just like 4 or 5 buildings with a potion and some pocket change hidden inside them. The villagers would be lucky if they had a single bathroom in the whole place.
They are also designed for one player to walk through them, instead of the millions of people a normal city has.
Like, how many of those cities have a functioning public transport?
Videogame towns feel like an amusement park facade. Very few dont require you suspend your disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief is the responsibility of the content, not the consumer. Convince me these are the rules and I’ll fall into the media.
Racing games tho
Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American
Videogame cities are all dead and creepy... I can't imagine what anybody finds beautiful about them.
Of course, they are this way because they are literally designed, by a tiny number of people, and with sole focus on the player. But still, no idea why anybody can think they are beautiful.
I spent I think over ten hours just hanging out in Gerudo town in breath of the wild. I remember watching my “hero’s journey” thing and when I got there it was just stuck scribbling over the town for ever lol. Super chill vibes
Ok but KCD2 though. Wonderful villages.
GTA & Cyberpunk 2077
Blighttown is beautiful this time of year
Uuhhm, ever played "Crossy Road"? Yea, lib owned!!!
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